Phyllis Omido during a meeting with community members and former factory workers in Owino Uhuru.
Photograph: Goldman environmental prize

Call her the Erin Brockovich of east Africa. They haven’t made the movie yet, but Phyllis Omido has a heroic tale to tell of forcing the closure of a lead smelting plant that was poisoning the inhabitants of a Kenyan slum – including her own baby.

It would be a terrifying moment for any mother. Her baby was rushed to hospital with a mystery illness. “At first we thought it was malaria or typhoid, but doctors found he was suffering from lead poisoning.” The lead must have come from the smelter where Phyllis had recently started work as a community liaison officer.

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“The doctors said the lead reached my baby through my breast milk.” Phyllis said in London last week. She was on her way to San Francisco to receive the Africa award of the prestigious Goldman prize for environmental campaigners.

The smelter – built in the heart of Owino Uhuru, a densely-packed slum in Mombasa, Kenya’s second city – extracted lead from used car batteries. In the process, it emitted fumes laden with lead and spewed untreated acid wastewater into streams where people bathed. Lead is a potent neurotoxin. It damages the development of children, targeting the brain and nervous system.

The smelter had begun operations in 2009 without any environmental impact assessment (EIA). One of Phyllis’s first jobs was to commission one. When the findings revealed that the smelter was poisoning the neighbourhood, she figured that the only honest thing for a community relations officer to do was recommend that the smelter be closed and relocated somewhere safer.

Her employers thought differently. She was swiftly reassigned and the company brought in another consultant to complete the EIA. But when her baby son became ill and tests revealed lead poisoning, what had been a professional dispute became personal.

“When my baby came out of hospital, I wanted to know if other children were being poisoned. I picked three at random and got their blood tested,” she remembered. In each case, their blood-lead levels were well above the danger level for children set by the US Centers for Disease Control. She left the company and began a campaign to shut the smelter.

“I went to the company’s directors and the government’s environment agency, which had licensed the smelter. I showed them reports from lead experts. But nobody wanted to listen,” she says. Meanwhile, children were getting sick; women were having miscarriages; even the neighbourhood chickens were dying.

She claims that the company routinely sacked workers after a few months because it knew their exposure to lead was unsafe. But after a worker died, the community held a demonstration. A local MP, who was also a minister for the environment, came. “We hoped he would help. But he said we should keep quiet because the company brought jobs. He accused me of being in league with his political opponents.”

After another demonstration, Phyllis was arrested and taken to court for inciting violence. “I could have got ten years if I had been found guilty. But the judge threw the case out.”

After that, she got help from outside groups including Human Rights Watch. After a meeting with the UN special rapporteur on toxic waste, a committee of the Kenyan senate came to see the situation. By 2014, facing the risk of a dressing down from the senate and another round of national publicity, the company finally closed the plant.

“The air may be clean now, but the soils and the ponds are still contaminated with lead,” she says. An independent study has found lead levels in local dust and soils up to ten times those in another slum neighbourhood. “Our vegetables and our fish are toxic.” Phyllis is taking the Kenyan government and its environment agency to court, demanding that they clean up and provide compensation.

How is her son? “He is well now,” she says. “Some people say I should get his IQ tested to see if the lead damaged his development, but I don’t want to do that. What difference would it make?”

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Phyllis is one of six winners of the international Goldman prizes, awarded on Monday in San Francisco. Others are Myint Zaw from Burma, who stopped a dam on the Irrawaddy river; Howard Wood in Scotland and Jean Wiener of Haiti, who both successfully campaigned for community-managed Marine Protected Areas in their respectively countries; Marilyn Baptiste, who defeated a proposal for a huge gold mine on the lands of her First Nation community in Canada; and Berta Caceres of Honduras, who stopped another dam on indigenous land.